totally cool and normal and chill and cool and…

"Un-uhlaive? UN-UHLAIVE? Ma'am, that man has been killed. He has been MUHDUHED. To DEATH."

what if you were GAY and your girlfriend was the personification of DEATH and then your SON died and she had to reap his SOUL or whatever because it was her JOB and then you never forgave her but she still LOVED you and then you projected your GRIEF onto a random teenager while battling through DEATH trials with PATTI LUPONE

i feel like people who really latched onto the rat grinders are leaning much more into the manipulation/grooming angle as justification for redemption or innocence than is necessarily justified in the text; and it’s especially silly to me when people will point to penelope everpetal as a juxtaposition and suggest that killing penelope (a high schooler) was okay but killing the rat grinders (high schoolers) isn’t okay because the circumstances are different, when there isn’t real proof that the circumstances are different. we know next to nothing about how or why they became involved in porter’s scheme, but the previous teenage villains were almost invariably acting on their own initiative but working with the larger threats because of shared goals; it’s not that weird that the rat grinders would be similar. i don’t think that brennan has ever had a teen be forgiven because they’re a teen, which makes sense, because this is a story told through the perspective of teens and that’s not sufficient or satisfying. i disliked how the deaths happened this episode and i hope the rat grinders can come back post-ankarna’s restoration but i hate taking away the agency of teens to be willfully terrible in the interest of defending them.